Florin Vadean & Stephen Allan
Workers in adult social care tend to be low paid. Little is known though about what determines pay levels or how much competition for workers there is between care providers. Using staffing data for England from the Adult Social Care Workforce Data Set for the years 2016 to 2019, we looked at the reasons for wage differences between care staff and at how much employment levels for a provider change in response to wages.
We found care staff working for private and voluntary providers earned substantially lower wages than those with the same qualifications, experience and job role employed by local authorities. We also found that care providers paying lower wages are not (immediately) losing their staff, potentially due to the relationship care staff develop with the people they care for or difficulties in finding alternative jobs in the local area paying higher wages. Therefore, care providers do have some market power, and competition for workers between them is rather modest. Wages and competition for care staff between providers may have been suppressed by the local authorities’ ability to keep prices for care services low.
Florin Vadean, f.vadean@kent.ac.uk.
